You getting harassed like that in the hall? It’s probably not only about you being gay. From where I sit I would say you’re getting shoved around not for being queer as in homosexual but for being queer as in weird. I mean weird kids do have this aura to them. It’s like a smell almost. They’re stuck somewhere in their heads, in some kind of a bubble. People can’t really help themselves: They see a bubble, they want to pop it.
Sincerely,
Adam Kurlansky
Tuesday, September 15
Dear Kurl,
Drama! Scandal! Intrigue! Mystery! Guess whom I read about in the Lincoln Herald this morning? Front-page news:
Kurl Walks! Wolvies Up 16 at ¾ Home Opener, Fullback Adam Kurlansky Quits Team, Costs Game
I suppose it testifies to my near-total social isolation and my alienation from the culture of the school that I didn’t hear about this event until reading it in the Herald. I’m certain it officially makes me the last person at Lincoln to receive the news. The fact that my sister’s friend Bronwyn wrote the story adds irony to my ignorance, since she and Shayna undoubtedly spent half of last night talking about it and I still didn’t catch on. I haven’t yet mentioned to them that Adam Kurlansky is my assigned pen pal, I suppose because at some level we seem an unlikely match.
Permit me to quote from the news story:
“Coach Samuels told the Herald he is focused on keeping things positive, helping the Wolverines pull together to fill the gap left by Kurlansky. ‘I’m concerned, sure,’ he admitted. ‘But Kurl is a good kid, a fighter, a real lion. I’m sure he’ll turn it around in time to contribute this season.’ Kurlansky himself declined to comment on Friday night’s walkout. When we asked him whether we can expect him back on the field this year, his reply was simply, ‘I doubt it.’”
I hope you won’t hold it against Bron for writing the piece. Perhaps, like me, you feel it edges into the sphere of celebrity gossip. Bronwyn Otulah-Tierney can be, at times, overzealous. She is very focused on building her portfolio for her applications to the best journalism schools in the country.
I reread your most recent letter last night, Kurl, and I’d like to clarify one point: I never meant to imply that I get bullied only because of my sexual orientation, or even that it’s in any way mysterious to me why I get singled out. Above all it was not my intention to complain about being mistreated. Maybe I am queer as in weird, as you theorize so eloquently. But my weirdness is merely a natural by-product of having my sights set on something beyond high school, namely poetry.
Kurl, can you truly blame me for wanting to focus on something other than my immediate surroundings? Be honest: If you could, wouldn’t you want to immerse yourself in something bigger than the squalid little torments of adolescence? Wouldn’t you want to transcend the mind-numbing boredom of, say, tenth-grade Business and Technology class? Mr. Carlsen stands up there in front of us in his Gap cords, rocking back and forth on the balls of his feet and rhapsodizing about Excel budgets and search engine optimization, and the only reason I can refrain from running out and lighting myself on fire is that my mind is elsewhere. Call it an aura; call it a bubble. I understand how it incites others to malice and torment. It drives even Shayna and Lyle crazy when they talk to me and I don’t seem to hear their voices.
I was rereading Walt Whitman’s book Leaves of Grass last night, and I copied out these stanzas for you (enclosed). They capture the spirit of heroism I was trying to describe. Whitman is talking here about lending his spirit to humanity in general, but You shall not go down! Hang your whole weight upon me sums up my father’s steady, positive strength and his devotion to me and Shayna.
Yours truly,
Jonathan Hopkirk
Thursday, September 17
Dear Little JO,
I guess I can tell you about heroes. Sacrifice et cetera. My dad died falling off a roof when I was ten. My uncle Viktor held up the business alone for a few years but it nearly went bankrupt. So my brother Sylvan quit his job and went to work for him full-time. He was twenty or twenty-one by then and halfway through his electrician’s training, but he just dropped everything. You should see his shitty apartment. I mean I’m pretty sure all his savings went into Kurlansky Roofing and they’re not exactly making a killing. He has never said a word about any of this to me.
The thing about heroes is they make you look at yourself. Your brother is a hero, people will say to me. Meaning my middle brother Mark actually, not Sylvan. Meaning Afghanistan. They’ll say it to me because they want to remind me. Also because according to Sylvan Mark always shrugs them off when they say stuff like that to him. No such thing as the world becoming a better place, he’ll tell them.
Mark’s earned it for sure. He was deployed just after his eighteenth birthday. I mean he was a few months younger than I am now. Even Uncle Vik shuts right up when Mark’s around.
I don’t know about those poems you keep sending me. That last one especially. I dilate you with tremendous breath or whatever? I don’t know if Walt Whitman is really who you want to model yourself after. I have to say he comes across as sort of a douche. I could do without all the poems.
The thing about heroes is that they ask without asking: What about you? What are you waiting for?
I would have to tell them I’m actually waiting for nothing.
Sincerely,
Adam Kurlansky
Monday, September 21
Dear Kurl,
Will you permit me a random observation on the group of little JOs who’ve taken to habitually hassling me (I call them, collectively, the butcherboys)? It’s difficult for me to focus on any other letter-writing topic when, just before class, my satchel was co-opted by the butcherboys and flung onto the roof of the school.
You may or may not have noticed a certain little JO named Christopher Dowell in the group. Now, there’s a young man who, you can be sure, will never earn himself a cool nickname. In my experience, it’s always the one in the group whose own position is most precarious, the one who walks the thin, thin line between insider and outcast—you can count on it, it’ll be him who hits the hardest, who laughs the loudest. The other butcherboys don’t particularly care whether I live or die, but this one, this Dowell—he’s the one who really hates me. Because Dowell knows, and he knows I know, that he’s a lot closer to being like me than his so-called friends are.
I was sorry to read about your father passing away. I hadn’t realized we’d both lost a parent; in an oblique, circumstantial way, this gives us something in common.
You sounded somewhat depressed in your last letter. I hope you’re not regretting your decision to stop playing football? I am going to assume, Kurl, that if you want to share with me your reasons for quitting the football team in such a dramatic and precipitous manner, you will. I’m curious, of course. But as I sat there earlier today in Math, rereading Bron’s Herald story under my desk, I suddenly thought about what it must be like for you, at school and maybe at home, too, being continually judged for your actions and asked to explain yourself to everyone.
Please don’t feel any obligation to explain anything to me. My point is quite the opposite: I want to invite you to feel free to use the space of these letters to talk about things that actually interest you, to muse about the topics that dominate your thoughts when you’re alone. We might as well take advantage of the fact that we don’t owe each other anything, that no one else is ever going to read what we’re writing, that it’s just me and you and whatever we feel like saying.